“Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.”
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”
“If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.”
“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
“Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.”
“Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.”
“It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.”
“But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?”
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
“Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”
“One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.”
“Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.”